Hans Bethe
German-American nuclear physicist · France · Scientists · Lived 1906 to 2005 · aged 98
Hans Bethe is read about 546 times a day, in 88 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 21 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 396 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He worked out how stars burn, built the first atomic bombs, then spent decades trying to contain what he'd helped unleash. Bethe wrote the equations that power the sun and the weapons that ended a war - and kept publishing until he was ninety-seven.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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In their own words 3
, We have more nuclear warheads than the Russians, and I consider this to be the most important measure of relative strength. In addition, as Dr.
You should look at all the experimental information at hand, not only the most relevant, and be prepared to make conjectures if that helps.
If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them.
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Born in Germany in 1906, Bethe fled to America and landed at Cornell, where he'd stay most of his life. In 1939 he published the paper describing the CNO cycle - the fusion process that keeps heavy stars alight - work that won him the Nobel in 1967. During World War II he ran the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, calculating critical masses and the implosion mechanics behind Fat Man. He joined the hydrogen bomb project hoping to prove it couldn't work, then stayed on when it could. After that he reversed course: campaigning with Einstein against testing, helping negotiate the 1963 test ban and the 1972 ABM treaty. Along the way he revolutionized quantum electrodynamics with his calculation of the Lamb shift in 1947, advanced neutrino theory, and worked on supernovas. He published his last major paper in his nineties, nearly seventy years after his first.
In common with Hans
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